


Azrael Rising

by Aphoride



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Actually just an entire funeral, Anger, Angst, Atmospheric Rain, Bullying, Christian Themes, Community: HPFT, Dark fic, Death Themes, Drama, Father-Son Relationship, Funeral themes, Gen, Implied Murder, Implied Torture, Theft, Tom Riddle is a psychopath, graveyard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-31 10:14:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6466330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aphoride/pseuds/Aphoride
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In death we are reborn anew; though the death doesn't have to be ours.</p><p>Or,</p><p>Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted</p><p>Matthew 5.4</p>
            </blockquote>





	Azrael Rising

Azrael Rising

It is raining: a thin, weak patter which leaves no marks on his jacket, so light he barely feels it at all even as drop after drop after drop lands on his head, on his hands. Invisible, all of them – unless, unless you turn your head just so, just a little, to see them zip through the air, slender lines of dark grey against a backdrop of silver. There is no sun to make them shine, covered by the clouds overhead, hanging low and heavy, and he thinks that he prefers it this way.

A summer thunderstorm is passing through; quaint and appropriately cliché.

The thought makes his lip curl slightly – an unintentional, fleeting thing – and he almost wants to laugh. That the world would somehow mourn, grieve and weep for his father is absurd, but he has never really believed in coincidences.

Destiny is everything, and it leaves no room for anything outside of it.

Overhead, a sparrow flies, black and swift, swooping lazily through the air on banks of wind, drifting off into the distance, high above the cathedral spires, tall and spiked and stone curls and crosses. There’s nothing else in sight; no people either. The entire town – city, he supposes, but it’s hardly big enough to really have earned that name – is silent.

He imagines this would be what it would be like if everyone in it was dead: quiet and solemn, a peace settling over it all like a shroud.

The wind brushes through the trees, snapping at the frail, wooden signs outside a small row of shops – butchers, dressmakers, undertakers – and a single, lonely cottage, thatched roof out of place amongst all the slopes of tile and stone. It pulls at his hair, too, or tries: the oil slicking it down holds it firmly in place, better than any Muggle substance could do.

Around the corner, trees giving way to a wide lawn, there is the cathedral, its spires brushing the sky, the stone a grey-sand colour in the dim light and the large arched windows dark. Crowned with battlements on the square towers rising up from the front, it looks more like a castle at first glance, than a cathedral, save for the sandstone cross which grows out of the arch between the two towers, directly over the doors below.

Everything around it quiet, still, and he cannot imagine the place ever being warm or friendly. Even now, with a thin trickle of people walking up from the village, all of them decked from head to toe in black – and none of them, he notes as he gets closer, torn between a sense of satisfaction and an odd hatred, have even so much as a tear in their eye – the soft murmur of voices and the clicking of heels on pavements and cobblestones does not touch the cathedral. It is almost as though there is something surrounding it, something sound cannot penetrate, keeping it constantly at bay.

Unheard and unseen, he slips in amongst the church-goers, blending in seamlessly with the black ties and jackets all around.

“– the estate will just sit there, they say – no one’s come forward to claim it –”

“Never the nicest, but that don’t change things –”

“– can’t stay too long, got to get back to the shop quick as –”

People are talking, loud and quiet, gossiping and questioning – discussing the weather and local politics, how Bessie’s boy is at the moment, and what the latest news is from London – but he doesn’t listen to them. His eyes are staring straight ahead, his face smooth and carefully blank.

By the door, the priest is murmuring ‘welcome’ to the congregation, clasping hands of people passing through, the sombre expression on his face undone by the purple and gold stole hanging around his neck and the twitching of his mouth every now and then.

The priest says nothing to him; he looks through him, past him and onto the person behind him.

He doesn’t care, though he notices – he always notices who sees him, who doesn’t; one of those little things he collects endlessly – because what would the priest say? A mere ‘welcome’ would never be near enough, but what more could be said then, in the doorway of the cathedral, surrounded by locals, people watching for gossip, for secrets revealed?

Inside, the mourners (though none of them there are mourning, not in any true sense of the word) are dotted around the first thirty rows of the cathedral; the entirety, or almost, of three towns all stuffed into this one place, craning their necks to get a good look at the row of caskets up ahead.

One by one, they file by in silence – but he doesn’t queue, won’t queue, not for this, not for him.

Silent, he slips up the far side of the church, shadows and slanted windows of light alike passing over his face, casting him in alternate black and pale yellow every five seconds. Both ripple off of him, dancing and weaving over his face and across his shoulders, down the front of his suit, as though he is a mirage: not quite real, and yet real enough to be called true.

It would be hard to say which suited him best: either way, he is handsome.

In no time at all, or perhaps all the time in the world – who can say? – he arrives at the top of the cathedral, a huge stained glass window sending faint, glittering rainbows across the maple boxes in front and, as he steps forward once, twice, three long, smooth strides to stop at the feet of the coffin in the centre, and looks down at the soft brown wood, strains of yellow and orange-beige here and there, the world around him, behind him, seems to fade away, sounds and smells and sights all vanishing.

There is only him and the dead, and the whirlwind of contradictions in his stomach.

* * *

_'I am the resurrection and the life,' says the Lord. 'Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.'_

\- John 11.25,26

In one motion, tens of knees bend and crash into the stone floor, heads bow and hands are clasped, fingers white and red in the cold; for a moment, after everyone has stilled and every twist of fabric has floated down into place, there is silence, and then, only then, does the service really begin.

He doesn’t really listen to the words the vicar speaks at the head of the church, doesn’t really think about what they mean or what they say, but merely dutifully repeats them quietly, his voice lost amongst the clamour of the throng. His fingertips are pressing hard against the bones in his hands, red skin against white, the skin stretched taut, bloodless and thin, and he watches how when he pushes here or pulls there, he can see the muscles and the tendons underneath move.

Briefly, he wonders if he could do that to another person – if it would look the same, if they would feel the same way he did: nothing at all except for the pressure on the bones.

Blood and bone – his father’s and now his; an inheritance of flesh, of more than just flesh.

(If he concentrates enough, fierce and determined and coldly curious, he can make things shatter, make people bleed from behind their eyes, under their nails and teeth and old, long-forgotten scrapes and cuts.

Opening up people, tugging and tugging at a loose end until it starts unravelling rows and columns entire; he tried it first on clothes, on bolts in tables and chairs and doors.)

At night he dreams of him, this man who has given him everything and nothing, life but no home, and a name but no life, faceless and haloed in sunlight as he steps through the door of the orphanage, dark hair sleek and styled, clothes neat and new, the buttons gleaming and the shoes shining. He never hears words, never a voice or a sound as some of the other children claim – they say it’s the truth, but he knows it’s all a lie, that none of them remember anything and so they cling, cling tight and fast to anything they can find. Pitiful and yet he can’t escape it himself; it makes his hands curl into fists, his nails dig deep into his own skin to think that he’s just the same.

Instead, there is silence, just silence as his father wordlessly extends his hand, and leads him from the orphanage, out of the door to a better life, a more worthy life.

He never looks back in his dreams, never cries or wonders or smiles. He just always simply goes.

Sometimes, when the sun peeks through the rain in February, the new year old enough to be nothing new, making clouds glow like lightbulbs, he can see it then – for a second, for a heartbeat, he’ll picture it, clear as day.

It fades, it always fades, and he slips away, a wraith of a child, into the belly of the orphanage, a ruler and a pennywhistle and a farthing falling into his pockets as he goes.

(Other children collect beetles and bugs, sticks, smooth pebbles from the beaches they go to every year, or old, dead leaves the colour of old wine stains. He collects trophies, mementos from his victories.

He wants to collect people, but he can’t bring himself to be patient enough.)

They’re being lined up, all the children, in pairs – he loiters alone at the back, hands in his pockets, while the others pretend they’re not fighting to stay closest to the teachers and furthest from him – when there’s a scream, shrill and loud, a note of terror in it which thrills straight to his very core.

Just out of sight, tucked behind an ornate carved headstone is a boy, older and scrawny, with a stone scythe across the back of his neck, the shaft pressed tight from his shoulder to his hip, trapping him in place. He is suppliant, bowing and scraping and crying relentlessly; an unwilling acolyte to a greater power, to a reality he doesn’t understand and doesn’t see.

The boy’s name is Jim and he’s a cruel, bullying sort of boy: he steals things from younger children, takes their teddy bears and their blankets, throws their food on the ground and twists their arms behind their backs until they cry and cry and promise him the world if he’ll let them go.

He stole a mouth-piano from Tom once: a delicate little thing, finely worked and perfectly tuned, with faded gold filigree down one side.

“It moved,” Jim is saying when one of the women from the orphanage, plump and maternal in the way that iron is maternal, coaxes him out of the statue’s grip. “The angel – the headstone. It moved. I swear.”

He’s babbling, mouth moving a mile a minute, the words becoming more insistent, more crazed, and he still repeats the same thing over and over and over again.

It moved. The angel moved.

In Tom’s pocket is four pennies, a mouth-piano with a dent a week old in it, and a bag of liquorice sticks Jim had been flaunting that morning.

He wanders back to the orphanage, following the rest in their pretty train of paired, chattering, doomed children, and he thinks that when his father comes for him, when his father finds him again, he’ll have his own mouth-organ – new and edged in silver with a shiny mahogany coating – and he’ll eat liquorice sticks every day. There’ll be books to read and servants to order, gardens he could run in if he wanted, and a father who’ll tell him every day that he loves him, that he’s sorry, that he should never, ever have abandoned him.

Then, then, who’ll mock poor, abnormal, queer Tom Riddle and the demon who smiles from inside?

* * *

All around him is a lifting, lilting song – the women and children littering the cathedral singing something, a song he doesn’t care to remember from childhood, with a backing of choirboys and an old, tremulous organ – and it washes over him but never manages to take anything with it, waves on a cliff-side.

Through it all, a thin light, tinted blue and red and purple, plays over the wood of the coffin, blank and unassuming.

He knows what lies underneath, though, and imagines it: his face, but older and more lined from years of use, years of wear and tear, pale and waxy, dusted with a pinch of rouge to give some semblance of life. Dark hair, no hint of grey, brushed and carefully, artfully, arranged so it parts along a single, straight line; black to match his suit, a tiny green handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket, matching the tie around his neck.

Emerald green, Slytherin green. The irony of it all isn’t lost on him – he had laughed when he’d first seen, laughed and laughed and felt his fingers twitch with a want to raze every inch of the body off the face of the earth.

(He didn’t, and he won’t. He’s not so foolish as that.)

It feels strange, so very foreign, losing something he never had – losing something he had thought he he’d given up wanting so many years ago…

He had. He still did.

(It doesn’t explain the restless, relentless anger he feels, matching exactly the sensation he’d discovered when he realised he’d been abandoned by his mother, by his father, that no one had wanted him enough to keep him, to cling to life for him and nothing else.

It burns, hot and fierce and deep inside his stomach, swirling up and around his spine to his chest and his throat, leaving his mouth dry as bone, and his hands clenched tight, knuckles white through his skin. He breathes slow and steady, but there’s a shake in his body he can’t stop, and it’s a wonder he doesn’t sigh out smoke, thick and black and poisonous.)

The vicar is talking, his voice loud and reedy at once, a trembling hand raised towards the trio of coffins, father and son and mother, but the words avoid him. Really, he doesn’t know who they’re meant for – for the salvation of those who are already dead, or for those who sit in the cathedral only there out of a sense of duty they haven’t quite shaken off.

All he knows is that it’s not for him. The son who never lived, the child who never was – to these people, he isn’t there, nameless and invisible.

They may have come out of duty, he is there for victory – this is his last salute, his triumphal arch.

With one hand on his father’s coffin, he smiles, slow and deceptively soft, and murmurs two words.

“Hello, father.”

* * *

_He will remove the pall of sorrow hanging over all nations. He will destroy death for ever. He will wipe away the tears from every face._

\- Isaiah 25.7,8

Behind him is a tiny, spotted trail of red – a gingerbread trail of blood, tracking his flight deep into the bowels of the castle, far enough that there are no brackets on the walls, the only light emanating from his own wand, silvery and blinding. His footsteps echo and his breath, harsh and panting, is loud in the silence; he is alone again.

Sliding down the wall, he sits on the floor, examining the cut slashed across his palm. When he squeezes tight, closing his grip hard around nothing, he turns his hand and watches as a trio of drops fall, one after another after another, staining the damp, bare ground.

He’s far under the lake – the ceiling is straight but ribbon-like tendrils of algae creep down through cracks in the stone, growing out of the water pooled in between the stone.

Every now and then, there is a whisper, a pulse of something overhead, underneath, all around; something strong and steady, pushing and pulling like the tide on the banks of the Thames. It’s old and warm, sharp though, and it makes him feel entirely and completely at home, unwinding his muscles, soothing and reminding.

There will be time for revenge later, there will come a day when he will make them see, make them all see – every last witch and wizard and tiny, warlock child. They will see he’s better than them, above and beyond their precious blood purity, all their lists of long-dead names and added, subtracted halves and quarters.

Numbers don’t make purity, don’t make truth – he has both. He is both.

Laughter rings in his ears, unbidden and uninvited, harsh and musical, disbelief chiming through every syllable of it, hanging on every note. At first, it’s only quiet, but then it grows, becoming louder and louder, grating on his nerves and his veins, the adrenaline still flooding through them heady, caressing the magic in his blood from the tip of his wand to the centre of his heart, the sparks of power which flicker there hot and wildly enticing.

(It reminds him, breathless, of how with a flick of his wrist he can peel off layers of skin, of muscle, of bone; carving straight down into the soul, into the very essence of a person.

Of the purity of pain, how a single scream sets his spine to tingling, delicate and ardent in the way it brushes, light as a feather, over his skin.

When the other boys in his dorm talk in hushed voices of girls, how soft and supple their skin is, how their skin flushes like a blooming rose as they swoon and sigh and heat up with the thousand possibilities hands and mouths and new, fascinating experiences can give, he thinks of the wonder of magic, of the million facets of emotions he can pull out of a person’s face, the muscles dancing and contorting.

Girls are lithe and pretty, boys are handsome and corded with muscles and tendons; he wants to experience both.)

They have cut him – Black and Malfoy and Avery, Crabbe and Goyle – they have left marks on his skin, purple and green and yellow, and nothing ends in a day. Rome was not built in a day; revenge comes swiftly, but subtly, shadows on the wall creeping and creeping before they strike, sure and vicious.

Blood will out, and his will win – he is Salazar’s heir, with Slytherin’s blood in his veins, the only gift from a mother who failed him, from a family he will never have, but a gift which swallows him whole and remakes him.

There is nothing in this world which can defeat him, least of all them.

* * *

He winds up and down the rows and aisles inside the cathedral, passing underneath arches and high, reaching ceilings, past plates commemorating those long gone, the rich and the talented, down away from the coffins at the head of it all, away from the vicar’s droning, sonorous voice. As he goes, he steps over bags, around knees and legs, climbing steps of nothing to walk along the tops of the pews, sleek and safe, avoiding hats and the hands of children, too small and too curious to sit still.

His lip curls, his hand curls around his wand in his pocket, and he thinks on power, on death, on how easy it would be – how simple, to end them all here and now and have done with their petty, simple lives.

A fitting tribute, in its way, to his father’s abandonment and his mother’s name – to leave this place a mausoleum, cold and dead and empty, decorated only with corpses, their last moments splattered across the scene in a mockery of a tableau.

He does nothing and tells himself its not weakness, not mercy or pity or fear which stays his hand.

(It isn’t.

He has already sacrificed in his father’s name, in his father’s honour – he allows a small laugh to escape, cold and high, and a woman jumps, startled, searching for something behind her – or why else would there be three coffins?

His grandmother first, for his mother’s weakness; his grandfather second, for his father’s fear.)

Towards the end, he slips round, round behind the vicar, behind the altar, and stands at his father’s head, the solitary wreath in the centre of it – white lilies and red poppies – still and bright.

Tentatively, paternally, he reaches out and rests a hand on the coffin, the ring on his finger glinting when the light touches it, crackling along the broken line through the centre of it. Something rushes through his chest, quick and foreign and it tugs on his clothes, on his heart, on the tattered edges of his soul. It leaves him twisted, turned and jumbled; the world is coloured grey in that moment, the effervescent melancholy winding down the streets of London from his childhood returning to steal him back.

He doesn’t stay for the rest of the service, blowing out of the cathedral as the candles on the altar die.

* * *

_For yours is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever._

\- Matthew 6.13

The wind rustles through the trees, shuffling the leaves as it goes, spraying the last of the blossom, petals full and fat and tinged with brown, onto the floor, a pink-and-white carpet underneath his feet. Nestled nearby, a bird sings, short and sharp, and on the breeze there is the scent of flowers, of the daisies and the buttercups and the wild lavender growing alongside the road.

It is the height of summer, and he’s come for his past – to meet it, to face it, to destroy it for once and for all.

He feels odd, after so many weeks in robes, in a shirt and a jacket, a tie around his neck in a smooth cobalt blue – he fits in perfectly, his father’s son – simultaneously both older and younger than he is. There’s something so bizarre about wearing the life he could have had, about seeing it on himself when he looks in the mirror: the tailored Muggle clothes hanging off his frame in a waterfall of deep grey.

A deception, but only skin deep and barely that far: magic lingers around him, accompanying him like perfume does women, sparking and darting as electricity does along steel.

In front of him there is a bend in the road, a bend down and south and up to Greater Hangleton; Little Hangleton is behind him, with the shouts of the farmers and the clamour of wives to their husbands and children, the clucking of chickens in their pens on the back of trucks.

To the left, there is a hill, a manor house nestled in on its side; to the right, half-hidden amongst a swell of overgrown bushes, nettled and spiked and starved, is a small, squat shack.

His father on one side, Muggle and rich and cowardly; his mother on the other, magical and forgotten and weak; and in between them both, he stands, patient and smouldering, counting down the seconds left.

He turns right.

(There is an icy calm in his stomach as he approaches the rotting, faded door, pitted against the fluttering in his chest whenever he looks at the manor, and he feels his lip curl as he looks at it, the place where his mother was born, where he might have lived if things had been different.

His mother had been right to die, right to run and crash and fade, leaving only him behind, the last of her flesh and her blood, but far stronger and better: this was nothing, nothing at all for the heirs of Slytherin.

At least, he supposed, she seemed to have understood that.)

He pushes the door open, only disdainful of the snake nailed to the door, jaw hanging loose and scales dulled, only to see a mess of a man on the floor, surrounded by dirt, mud and grass and old, crumpled leaves, layers of dust spotted only by footsteps and fingerprints, smudged and scattered.

There is a moment, where they look at each other, the heirs of Slytherin, and then something feral, wild and ugly flashes in the other man’s eyes, and he snarls. There is a flash of recognition, but not enough – he is familiar but unknown.

It is enough, though, to damn him – but not quite, not yet. He may still be useful.

When his uncle, his poor stupid oaf of an uncle, is lying on the floor, seeing nothing and hearing nothing, he turns and leaves, closing the door behind him, his eyes fixed, narrow and unblinking, on the manor house on the hill, ivy winding up one side, green and thick and luscious.

A storm is brewing inside him, clouds gathering, growing fat and heavy with rain, winds stirring and swirling, howling loud and shrill; in the distance, thunder crashes and lightning coils in the heavens, preparing to strike. It thuds as he walks, as his heart beats faster and faster with each step he takes, slick and swift, the wind and the clouds rising, rising up from his stomach and through his throat until he chokes on it, on the ferocity of it all, and all he can think, all he knows is one, single truth.

Riddle had returned.

* * *

The sun has sunk down below the horizon long before he returns to Little Hangleton, dusky purple fingers pressing up above the horizon and leaving tiny, glittering stars behind them, embedded deeply in a sky of blue-black ink. In the centre of it all hangs the moon, yellow-white and shrouded by wisps of cloud.

There’s no light from the lamps lining the road, nothing from the windows of the houses either side, stretching down into the village – shadows are everywhere and he feels more relaxed in that moment than he had done through the whole rest of the day. Darkness is everywhere, the same in every place, and there’s something about the loneliness and the silence of walking at night which unties the knots in his shoulders and smooths out the muscles.

Somehow it feels almost right that he’s going to visit his father’s grave, in this way and at this time.

Weaving his way through the headstones in the graveyard, ducking under boughs and stepping past vases of flowers, he crunches weeds beneath his feet, trampling them into the earth. The new grave is easy enough to spot: darker blemishes on the ground, a heap of dirt piled up high in front of a single, freshly-carved stone.

An angel rises from on top of the grave, a tablet carved into the base, smooth and clean in the moonlight, names and dates cut into it; there is no epitaph – there was no one left to choose one. His left hand is outstretched, defending, reaching, grasping; the right is raised high, scythe in hand, tip pointing high into the sky, frozen before it can fall. The wings are outstretched, feathers picked out in exquisite detail, fanning out from the shoulders blades, arched and broad.

He stops in front of it, hands tucked inside his pockets in a mockery of the boy he once was, and looks down, moonlight tracing the ridges of the letters so he can read them.

His father had been young when he died, he realised – barely even forty, unmarried and stuck in a house with his parents. Thanks to him, Tom will never suffer the same fate, will never even come close to suffering it – he is twice protected, twice immortal.

It is fitting, he thinks, for the man who abandoned him, who never once wondered about the child he left, where he was and who he had become, to gift him such security, the assurance of living forever.

His mother gave her life so he could live, now his father has done the same.

And now, now he isn’t Tom Riddle, that ever-present reminder of the Muggle blood tainting his perfect, pure lineage, tainting Slytherin’s blood; no, he won’t be Tom Riddle any more, won’t have to live with a common name, with people shouting at him in the streets, with people sounding it out, a single pitiful syllable, as though it tastes of something foul.

Without knowing how or when, a chain around his neck, unseen but very much felt, has broken, the links of it rusted away so that nothing of the original metal remains, no silver in the light but only flakes of brown falling in a stream to the floor, leaving him free – free of his father, free of all those sad, lonely dreams he had longed for as a child, free of all the memories of sitting by the window, waiting for someone who never came, free of every burden the spectre of his father, the weight of his name, had ever pushed on him.

Now, he is no more his father’s son and no more the last of his useless mother’s line, inbred and violently mad – now he is Salazar’s heir, and nothing less.

_To him be glory forever._

\- Romans 11.36


End file.
